Ever feel like you are swimming upstream in a never-ending flow of Twitter messages, Flickr photos and news headlines? Zumobi co-founder John SanGiovanni feels your pain. That's why the vice president of products and services at the Microsoft Research spin out incorporated the water metaphor into the company's latest iPhone application, Ziibii.

The new app -- released Sunday in the iPhone App Store -- allows users to select feeds from Facebook, YouTube or other sources and have them appear in what SanGiovanni describes as a "soothing" river of content. As headlines or videos float by on "rafts" on the iPhone screen, readers or viewers can simply click on them to discover more.

Sound strange? Well, the concept kind of perplexed us too when we got the pitch a few days ago. That was until we saw the Ziibii content river in action. (See video).

Ziibii, whose name is actually taken from a Native American word for river, attempts to solve the "choppy experience" that one encounters as they move among different social networking applications or news feeds on the iPhone, SanGiovanni said. By concentrating them in one visual flow, he hopes people can more easily consume information.

Users also can speed up or slow down the content river depending on their preference. Or they can choose to receive information from one source, say YouTube or Boing Boing.

"We all live in a time of information overload," said SanGiovanni. "I got to a point actually at Microsoft where the email volume was so high, that there is no way you are going to touch every single email. So it became sort of this passing river of information and you tap on things you are interested in. And in the world of Twitter, that metaphor even makes more sense."

Ziibii is free, with the company planning to make money by floating targeted ads on specially-branded rafts in the river.

"We actually know a lot about the user," said SanGiovanni. "So if we know that somebody tracks the YouTube automotive channel, for example, we might want to-- if we had a relationship with Toyota -- distribute Toyota rafts into the river."

Zumobi also plans to float other applications that it builds into the digital river as a distribution channel for new products.

Of course, like all free iPhone applications, Ziibii is dependent on gaining massive adoption. The company is hoping the unique nature of the product will set it apart.

Spun out of Microsoft with $12 million in funding from Oak Investment Partners, Hunt Ventures and others in April 2007, Zumobi is now moving aggressively into developing applications for what SanGiovanni dubbed "super phones."